The event is sponsored by the departments of Sociology, Anthropology and Crime and Justice Studies, Women's and Gender Studies, African and African-American Studies, the Labor Education Center, the Center for Women, Gender and Sexuality, and the Unity House.

Norma Guillard is a poet, educator, and advocate. As a teenager, she joined the Cuban Revolution's literacy campaign, and went off to teach reading and writing in rural communities. She has been an outspoken voice on issues of race, gender and sexuality in Cuba.

She is an adjunct professor at the University of Havana teaching psychology and gender, and a leader of the Cuban Association of Psychologists. She is also an advisor to the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and to the United Nations Development Program on the issue of gender in the prevention of HIV/AIDS.

She is a principal collaborator at the National Center for the Prevention of AIDS and the National Center for Sex Education (known as CENESEX in Cuba), which spearheads work to educate against homophobia and to lobby for civil unions in Cuba. Additionally, she is one of the founders of "Oremi," the first organization of lesbian and bisexual women in Cuba. As a black Cuban, she has played an important part in ongoing debates about race and racism in Cuba.

Guillard participated in the effort in Cuba to reprise playback theatre, an original form of improvisational theater in which audience or group members tell stories from their lives and watch them enacted on the spot. This type of theater is used to facilitate discussions about the impact of HIV/AIDS from the personal perspective of HIV positive people and their families.

She is also a published poet, and has participated in the making of numerous documentary films on topics ranging from the literacy campaign to HIV/AIDS.